European governments are burning wood and destroying forests in the name of clean energy, The New York Times reported.
In the north of Romania, the roads are littered with felled trees – once they were part of one of the largest and most valuable European massifs.
At the factories, the logs are ground into pellets, the so-called pellets – it is understood that they are obtained from waste and serve the great purpose of generating clean energy. However, last year the plants did not accept obsolete trees, but trees from protected forests.
This is what happens throughout Central Europe – the most valuable trees are placed on the “altar” of renewable energy sources. In the future, the pellets will be sent to all European countries, helping them fulfill their climate promises.
Despite the brutal attitude towards forests, none of this supply chain is a crime – in fact, it is subsidized as one of the strategies for obtaining clean energy.
Meanwhile, forests in Finland and Estonia, once considered a key factor in reducing CO2 emissions, are now “inhabited” by so many logging companies that scientists already consider them a source of emissions rather than carbon storage.
The same is true in other European countries – in Hungary, for example, the government has canceled the rules for forest conservation, thereby permitting to accelerate cutting in old-growth forests.